Yes, I am not very pleased that people hit all sorts of issues, it's probably my biggest "turn off" with Stella 7.
I'll prolly wait a few months until most of the big issues pan out, or perhaps wait for 7.1.

Mate desktop is probably not the best choice right now. The version we are seeing comes from a Fedora
special interest community effort (and they also maintain the epel repo). It's very minimal and incomplete. That's why we're struggling with it.

Centos probably wont give it much support because they have Gnome3 and KDE to wrestle with.
Stella7 would be less of a maintainance headache if it just mirrored what Centos does. That's just
the way it seems to me anyway... at least at the moment. Mate could still be an optional extra.

I wouldn't, not as the main desktop, unless you want to make all the changes it needs
and then package and distribute your own complete version, so it would work right out of the box.
Would you want to do that?

Centos7 and Mate are not really related. If you decided to go with Gnome3 from Centos,
you would be getting long time support, bug fixes, updates, etc. from them, and you would
have something stable. Like you say, 7.1 might be worth the wait. Everything is still
beta at the moment.

I still think that Mate would be really popular, but not the way it comes from epel.
I'm also just beginning to realize that it would be a major amount of work.

Yes. There is some truth in that and I am still thinking what to do.
The thing is I started with Gnome3 and while quite excited about it initially the novelty had soon worn off and I started to see all sorts of problems.
Indeed, waiting for 7.1 might be an idea.

The nice part of all this is we still have Stella 6.5. I expect that to be my main OS for some time yet. These other things keep me busy and I like doing it, but it's not like a job or anything. For you it's different.

hm ... where is the problem with mate? i use it since centos7 started and i've never come across a serious problem. on the contrary. suprisingly stable.

Hi bane
That's interesting. When you installed Mate did it give you a right click menu on the desktop, desktop icons, startup sound, pluma, and all that good stuff?
If you logout with a bunch of windows open, does your system crash and then not accept your password in a tty, forcing a reboot?
Can you dual boot from grub legacy?

Those are some of the problems I refer to. Maybe it's just my machine? I wish I knew because I like Mate.

oh yes, you're right. there is a problem with icons but easly solved.
i never used startup sound.
i'm using geany. didn't notice absent of pluma.
and i'm using computers only for buissines. turn on in the mornging and shutdown at the end of the day. i didn't notice logout problem. lockscreen and suspend is my favorite options.

centos5 was perfect, centos6 also. stella is perfect. centos7 is future. and because of my work i must start learning

gnome3,kde4 ... i don't have a right words. i started with centos7 minimal and openbox. and when i sucsessfully made crunchbang centos7 then i tried mate. and its working. very, very stable. with small problems you already mention.

Thanks bane for your reply. I don't feel so much like the Lone Ranger any more.
Like you say, the fixes aren't that tough.

Fedora has a community release of Mate built on Fedora20 (fits on a CD). I'm going to have a look.
I'm running hot and cold about Mate, but Gnome3 might be to blame for the nastys.
If it were built on top of a minimal install of Centos (without Gnome3 contamination), it might not
show some of the wierd problems we've noticed. I wander in wonder.